I don't intend the above to be read as a would-be theorem in economics ("if-then"), I just want to know how you reason here.
I'm not the person you've responded to but i don't think that these sentences are logically connected.
If the former is true then the hustle to get this attention will become even stronger, increasing the attention economy. Unless you're not talking about valuable in a momentary manner, but that would mean you've moved on from capitalism.
Technology should be modulating these difficulties, and instead some of it is short circuiting our more basic emotional systems. Lower hanging fruit. Though I wonder if the more difficult tasks that make us happier, more sustainable as individuals could be pursued in a purely capitalistic incentive scheme, provided it's viewed on a time scale of ten or twenty years instead of one. What businesses take such a long term perspective though?
Humans are weird, attention isn't nearly the only way to make money, and in fact, attention itself _depends_ on these other ways to even exist.
Think of it like the rich. Even though they themselves would never build a road, nor do they value building a road, they benefit hugely from them, such that those who are able to build roads make money. And the less people there are that can build roads, paradoxically, the more valuable the ability to build roads becomes.
It's for these reasons that things are so cyclical, this too shall pass.